


Rinley Yatskaya Makes An Answer

by EagleOfTheNinth



Category: Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine (RPG)
Genre: (the Academy doesn't have a monopoly on Bleakness), Gen, I made it serious, Missing Scene, Rinley is boss, dark but not GRIMdark, female Rinley Yatskaya, making answer to the Bleak, male Seizhi Schwan, thank you Count Dorku for inspiring me!, which I mention because those are not my own headcanons but this is a fic of a fic SO
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-12
Updated: 2019-11-12
Packaged: 2021-02-01 05:55:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,408
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21406333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EagleOfTheNinth/pseuds/EagleOfTheNinth
Summary: A missing scene from Count Dorku's 'Seizhi Schwan's Third Worst Halloween'. So what WAS inside Rinley's building?
Kudos: 6





	Rinley Yatskaya Makes An Answer

**Author's Note:**

  * For [CountDorku](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CountDorku/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Seizhi Schwan's Third Worst Halloween](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21224588) by [CountDorku](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CountDorku/pseuds/CountDorku). 

> Thank you to CountDorku for letting me play with your story a bit. I had SUCH fun writing this!

_I think that in general your role is going to be to be part of the social glue of the PC group. Bring people together. Keep them together. Level things out so that people can stay friends and nobody gets too isolated!  
-from the Troublemaker’s playbook, in Fortitude: The Glass Maker’s Dragon_

* * *

The sign on the outside of Rinley’s building reads HELPLESSNESS.

Inside, she stumbles from scenario to scenario. Fleeing one takes her to another; there’s no escape to be had.

She sees Chuubo drifting, withering, he never stops smiling but his smiles become hollower and hollower. A dead tree that’s somehow not falling down. A shell picked up from Big Lake’s shore, dry and clean without the soft living creature that should be inside it. One day the Marvellous Wish-Granting Engine lets out a long mechanical sigh and then goes silent. It never works again. Its creator has stopped wishing.

She’s there when Leonardo flames out at last, glorious and heroic, magnificent and dramatic and _unnecessary_. “You don’t need to go it alone,” she screams at him, “we could _help you_,” but Leonardo just scoffs and laughs at her and leaps into a darkness that swallows him up. Light blazes up from him bright and true, and the darkness is destroyed, but there’s no trace of Leo either-Nightmare’s Angel was always a tragic hero, but ‘tragic hero’ is never a good story for the people left behind-

She watches Natalia seal herself away behind layer on layer of emotional ice, till nothing can even begin to get through to her. Even Jasper’s warmth can’t melt it. She forgets kindness, or discards it, cuts herself loose from all human ties. She becomes something terrifying, brilliance and power with all the gentleness cut out, and because it’s _Natalia_, because Natalia is always the epitome of whatever she is and does, the Rats have to add a new Mystery into the Book of Names. _The Snow Queen, who is called Uncaring…_

She’s at a funeral, dressed in white. A Fortitude shrine maiden in a foggy Horizon cemetery. They don’t go in for cremation in Horizon, they bury people in the ground. Seizhi is going to go into the ground. He is so still and so cold and he will never be anything other than still and cold again. Rinley knew he was depressed, she _knew_ it, what else _is_ it when the deepest wish of someone’s heart is to be someone else so totally that they _stop being them_-but she didn’t know what to say or to do and now it’s too late and his parents are weeping and Laodemus looks more lost than anyone so huge and cheerful ever should.

She couldn’t do anything. She couldn’t save any of them, because how would that even be possible, she’s just one small kid playing dress-up in a fairytale hero’s name, just the baby of the group, everyone’s little sister. She can make them laugh maybe, just for a moment, she can see their hearts, but she can’t do anything that _matters_-

**(something taps at her mind, scratching at the door like one of the family cats trying to get into the bathroom. The shapes of bare trees against the sky, the higgledy-piggledy leaning gravestones. _A_ _Fortitude shrine maiden in a foggy Horizon cemetery._**

**The cemetery. The graveyard.**

**_Halloween_.)**

-suddenly, she can see the red light tinting everything.

Suddenly, she’s in her homemade costume of business suit and chitin claws, not in formal whites.

Suddenly, she is very, _very_ angry.

“This is wrong,” she says quietly, and then again louder, making everyone look at her, “This is wrong! _None of this has happened_!”

The world lurches around her. The red light is trying to find new ways in. It shows her taunting images of loss and pain, friendship-ending fights and outright death. It pulls up other faces-Eduard, Miramie, Edony, her father, her siblings. Rafael, hair still straw-golden but now also straw-brittle at the end of their life. The waiting wolf. You were useless to _them_, the light says. What makes you think you can do anything at all?

And it hurts, it hurts and it’s so convincing, it would be so easy to listen, it’s nothing she herself hasn’t thought in the pit of the night. But this time it’s not her thought, and how dare it, how _dare_ this hateful light use Rafael’s memory as a weapon? How dare it use her friends’ faces to hurt her?

So she bares her teeth, and stokes the flame of her wishing heart to a blaze, and she thinks as loudly as she can, _I wasn’t useless to Rafael. I couldn’t stop them from dying, but at least I still helped them a bit. At least I was their friend._

_I saved Eduard from the golden snake, and I nursed him back to health after._

_I helped recapture Iolithae Septimian when she escaped from the Titov shrine._

_I do the small things, too. I tell stories that make my friends laugh. Or groan-but either way they forget their troubles for a little while. I spend time with them and we have fun. I mend their clothes and stand them money for ice cream. I pester Kuroma and Caroline into remembering to be people as well as warriors and Mysteries. I help with the Fortitude TNR program. I hug my dad when he’s missing Mom. Those things count. They aren’t nothing. They aren’t futile._

_I am not the first Rinley Yatskaya, but I am still a Yatskaya. I do what I can, because that is what shrine families do. Because that is what people do. I tell my own story. And I say that my story DOES NOT GO LIKE THIS!_

**(Rinley hisses with stubborn feline fury, curling back her lip in disgust.)**

_“This is not the story of how Rinley Yatskaya fell into an evil thing’s trap and turned to despair._

_“This is the story of how the evil thing TRIED to hurt her, TRIED to make her afraid, but could. Not. Touch. Her!”_

**(She tells the story of a path, and she walks it. She tells the story of a door, and she goes through it. She tells the story that the red light has no power over her, and the sign above the building’s door changes to a row of question marks. She tells the story and in telling it she makes it True.)**

-the light is still red, but it’s just red light, now, just a colour, illuminating just a street. There are signs on every building, and the architecture is a gothic fever-dream, but it’s still just a street. She’s sitting in the back of a black sedan. Seizhi’s in the driver’s seat, and Leo in the front passenger seat, and she’s struck by a wave of warmth that makes her blink slowly. Everything about them is dear and familiar, from the bags under Leonardo’s eyes to that one cowlick of Seizhi’s that will never quite lie flat. They’re not dissolved into light or cold in caskets. They’re here. They’re alive.

(Natalia and Chuubo will be okay, too. She doesn’t know where they are, yet, but she knows they will be found safe. That is the story she has told.)

“If I’m being honest,” Seizhi is saying to Leo, “I was actually trying to get into the building next door – the one with the sign that’s just a typewritten shrug. I figured you were probably in there.”

“That is likely Yatskaya. I dread to think what unnameable horrors are required to penetrate the layers of delusion and insanity surrounding that twisted mind.” Oh, _Leo_. Same as ever (and even that thought is fond).

“Yeah, it was pretty bad,” Rinley agrees. She has no intention of telling them how bad, or why. They’re not the people to tell. This is something to talk about with Eduard, or with her family maybe. She’ll do that later.

The boys nearly jump out of their skins, turning in their seats to face her. “How did you get out?” Leonardo demands, staring at her as if he’s seen a twenty-foot-tall vampiric watermelon. (She should totally tell him the story about the twenty-foot-tall vampiric watermelon at some point.)

Rinley shrugs slightly, the barest corner of her mouth curving into a cat’s smile. “I got bored.”

(Sometimes it’s very useful, having a reputation as The Friend Who Talks Rubbish. People don’t press you for details.)


End file.
